Daily Inspiration Quote by E. Stanley Jones

Jones takes a sledgehammer to the tidy moral math that equates error with evil. In a single breath, he lowers the human self from “finished product” to “personality in the making,” then raises the stakes by admitting we’re “grappling with things too high for us.” The pairing is strategic: it dignifies ambition (we reach for transcendence) while refusing the arrogance of certainty (we’re limited). That tension is where his compassion lives.

The line “Obviously we, at very best, will make many mistakes” is doing pastoral work. It anticipates the scrupulous believer, the anxious striver, the person trained to treat every wrong turn as a stain. Jones isn’t excusing harm; he’s reclassifying the terrain. Mistakes are framed as inevitable byproducts of growth and finite understanding. Sin, by contrast, implies a moral rupture: willful rebellion, cruelty, or the conscious choice to dehumanize. The subtext is that a faith that cannot distinguish between immaturity and malice becomes spiritually abusive.

Context matters: Jones was a Methodist missionary and public Christian intellectual speaking into a 20th century scarred by war, colonial entanglements, and the pressure to claim absolute answers. “Things too high for us” nods to theology’s big claims about God and meaning, but also to the modern world’s complexity. He’s arguing for humility without despair: you can be accountable without being condemned. It’s an ethics of development, not perfectionism, and it’s meant to keep people moving forward rather than hiding in shame.